


Keep the Freckles (Revisited)

by anonymouse64



Category: Horus Heresy - Various Authors, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 15:48:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13954863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymouse64/pseuds/anonymouse64
Summary: Something of a fix-fic for Hiccup's excellent story 'Keep the Freckles', to give it the ending that I wanted. I do not intend to plagiarize their work. Up to a point, it is theirs, and beyond that it is mine.





	Keep the Freckles (Revisited)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hiccup (FriedensPanzer)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriedensPanzer/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Keep the Freckles](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3825478) by [Hiccup (FriedensPanzer)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriedensPanzer/pseuds/Hiccup). 



> Though the first half of the story is mostly the same as the original, I'd made a few small corrections as and when I saw them. See if you can spot them.

“What is it like, then? Even if you don’t call it fear, captain, something’s eating you.”  
  
“Is this off the record?”  
  
“It is.” Mersadie nodded – turning the statement into a lie immediately as she blink-clicked Loken’s mournful shrug.  
  
“Did you just..?”  
  
“Off the _official_ record, anyway. The stories that matter most are the ones we can never tell. It’s safe with me – just that I wanted to remember you, like this. Without the distortion of ordinary memory. If I may be candid, captain, I’m frightened by whatever lies ahead. “  
  
It was well into the night by ship-time, not that there were really days or nights here – least of all during warp transfer. Troops and crew kept to a stringent schedule, and even the Retreat grew quiet and emptied out somewhat during this part of the ship’s 24-hour cycle. For sanity’s sake.  
  
Loken squinted at the shoulder-guard he’d been working at with the lapping powder, and finding it burnished within an inch of its life sighed and reluctantly set it aside, the pot of powder and polishing cloth beside it. They were due to arrive on the outskirts of the Isstvan system in less than a month and a half, and he had nothing but bad feelings about that entire plan. He heaved another sigh, and let his hands drop into his lap uselessly.  
  
Mersadie shot him a sidelong look. The deformity of war-geared overgrowth of muscle and bone that marked all Astartes made him look all the more distant, alien, alienated – sitting on the far corner of his cot-bed in his near-empty room, looming out of the half-light like a lonely crag. Unexpectedly, she smiled to herself at the unbidden image of clouds wreathing his head, the miniscule flecks of white sea-birds circling him, making their nests under the overhang of his brow, the ocean lapping at his feet. The kind of thing she’d have dismissed as useless to a documentarist less than a year ago, ill-suited to the mood of the project, to the spirit of the Crusade, to the moment - lacking coherence. But now, she only turned the smile inwards and blink-clicked again – coherence had fallen out of the narrative somewhere around Davin, and laughter at least kept the creeping uncertainty at bay.  
  
The asking of questions too held comfort – inquiring was what she did for a living, after all. The chase after elusive truths was easy to get lost in, the heart of any matter lay so deep down that it was easy to dive into the search and not surface in the wider world again for weeks, to go untouched by it.  
  
“So…”She tried again “What is this not-fear that eats at you, captain? What’s it like?”  
  
“We do our best not to dwell. The Thousand Sons meditate on enumerations and we likewise have our mental exercises, though First Captain Abaddon mostly just tears apart combat training servitors – clearing one’s mind is often a matter of override, of forgetting, of conscious refusal to pay heed to fear and pain. Not that there is very much to pay heed to – there was extensive conditioning”  
  
He paused a moment, unsure how to go on.  
  
“As you see, such coping abilities do leave one at a disadvantage in verbalizing nuanced states of mind. A vague unease, a wrongness rears its head sometimes – it did at the Whisperheads. As for what lies ahead, whatever that may be…” He trailed off.  
  
“You wonder whether even the fortitude instilled in the Astartes in their making will be enough?”  
  
“You could say that, mistress Oliton. We were not bred for uncertainty. Not in matters of trust in the chain of command, not in matters of loyalty to our own. It is natural in times of confusion to long for the purity of combat – but without trust in the soundness of one’s orders, that purity dissolves. And what remains…”  
  
“What does remain?” Mersadie was comfortably on the trail of enquiry, in pursuit of answers. “What do you still experience clearly, without your systems overriding it?”  
  
Loken glanced over at her, then just as quickly looked away. Half closed his rain-grey eyes and clasped his hands together in his lap, his massive fingers interlacing tightly.  
  
“I am made for war. All else is distant. War is where I belong, though I know that this is hard for your kind to understand. When it goes right, it makes sense to me the way nothing else does, it is home. And when it does not, mistress Oliton… Do you know what my least favorite part of it all is?” He did not look up to see Mersadie shake her head.  
  
“The aftermath. We move beyond the reach of fear for the most part, we shrug off despair in the moment-to-moment of our work. There is total detachment, and even fear of death is an alien notion in the face of that numbing peace. But that peace ends. All battles end. It wears off. And what’s left behind, well… “  
  
“Our work” Mersadie noted the euphemism, wondering if it were for her sake or his own that Loken had used the phrase.  
  
“Guilt and regret are bestowed on us in equal measure to the rest of humanity.” He continued, his voice hoarse, subdued “If the orders come from a justified authority, if what all of it was for makes sense, then clarity of mind is easier to retain – and in any case, our next engagement lets us rise above it all on the updraft of the heat of battle soon enough. Killing xenos sits easy with us, killing human combatants is justifiable - but the killing of our own, and of surrendered troops, and of leaders come to parley - everything that happened in our campaign against the Auretians, everything that’s happened since Davin… Faith in the soundness of our orders is the ultimate and only absolution. And Horus...” Loken stopped abruptly.  
  
Even without his armor, dressed only in fatigue trousers, with his freckled shoulders hunched forward, Loken was no small man. Yet looking over at him - his head bowed, hands clasped, one bare foot covering the other - Mersadie couldn’t shake the impression that Captain Garviel Loken was trying his best to disappear.  
  
“But you don’t always need orders to kill, do you?” She asked, startled by the sharp, cutting edge in her own voice. The way he looked up, eyes wide and hazy, almost made her wish she hadn’t asked. Almost. “The civilians on the embarkation deck.”  
  
“I…” He turned to face her, and looking past her with unfocused eyes said quietly “I was afraid.”  
  
He sat silent and still for a while, staring at what Mersadie guessed was a blank piece of wall just past her left shoulder. A bereft look flickered across his features. Mersadie wondered if she’d just pushed too far – in their own way, her boundaries as a documentarist had blurred. Karkasy had paid with his life for crossing them. Since Davin, the story had fallen apart in her hands, the structures to which she hoped to pin it crumbling as she watched. There would be no documentary, and only questions were left – endless questions without structure or meaning. Questions, and human beings, and confusion and pain which she felt she had no right to inflict. What good would it do now, to grill him about those deaths? Still, she blink-clicked another pict - the disorientation, the guilt, the scars and the freckles hers to keep in the incorruptible stasis of her memory-coils.  
  
She pulled her knees up to her chin, and reached out in the only way she knew – flinging a question out as far back in time, away from all of this, as she could fathom.  
  
“What do you remember of Cthonia? From before you enlisted?”  
  
“Not much.” Loken shrugged, regaining his composure. He looked into her face, as though searching for something. “How much do you remember of your life before you came to make remembrance of the Crusade, Mersadie?”  
  
“Mostly that it seems long ago” She confided, her own first-name strange to her in his voice “Almost unreal. And it’s only been a year.”  
  
“Imagine decades. Add to that our extensive conditioning, that reconfiguring of human flesh and mind. Many never make it through, both minds and bodies break under the strain. Much about some procedures I have chosen not to remember, or recall too closely.” He sighed “And Cthonia, with all my mortal days is even further back than that.”  
  
Her question, cast with so much hope, had failed to illuminate anything that either of them could hold onto, burning its potential out in the distant void of the past. In the quasi-nocturnal quiet of the ship, as it churned its way through the warp, the two were adrift. For a little while, they sat in silence. Mersadie closed her eyes for a moment, imagining that the bed was a raft over dark waters, rocked by moon-glossed black wavelets whose quiet undulations reached out to every horizon.  
  
“I remember the moon.” Loken’s voice was soft, distant. “Cthonia has a single, enormous white moon. You could see it through the night-time smog, clear and bright like nothing could dim it…”  
  
Without opening her eyes, Mersadie smiled “Terra’s moon is nothing like that. It looks small most of the time, sometimes white and sometimes more like bone and sometimes, when it’s low on the horizon, huge and glowing a dim burnished yellow. They taught us about why this happens, but I can never remember much about it other than that it’s unhelpfully called “the moon illusion”. It looks heavy then for some reason, like a strange, golden fruit so full and so ripe that it will fall from the branch…” The sound of someone shifting their weight on the other end of the bed snapped her out of her reverie “I’m sorry captain, I’m babbling. I must be tired, I’m half dreaming. I had better go. I’m sorry to have overstayed my…”  
  
“Don’t…”  
  
Mersadie looked over at Loken. Somehow, between him turning to face her, and her hugging her knees to her chest over the course of their conversation, the distance between them had shrunk considerably.  
  
“Don’t apologize. It was good to listen to you talk for a change.”  
  
She made to get up.  
  
“And you’d best stay here tonight. It’s hardly a good idea for a lone remembrancer to be wandering around this part of the ship at unusual hours, let alone one associated with certain out-of-favour Astartes captains.”Loken smiled, his eyes soft “Besides, I liked hearing about Terra. You’re always asking me questions. Tell me something more of what you remember instead.”  
  
He leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes with a finality that suggested he wasn’t about to get up and see anyone to the door. Mersadie shuffled backwards until her back was likewise against the wall. Glanced sideways at the impassive form of the captain, his chest rising and falling with slow, easy breaths. Pale, scarred skin flecked with freckles the colour of autumn leaves. Up-close in the dim gloaming of the room he looked almost human – almost. The neat, dark circles of power-armour ports surrounded with the bruise-like discoloration where the black carapace came closest to the skin spoke of something else entirely. She closed her eyes and continued:  
  
“The yellow moon was always my favourite. When it’s only a half-moon it looks like a golden bowl about to tip over, and spill some kind bright, luminous nectar all through the sky. There’s always something unsteady about it, something of falling. I guess it’s because golden moons never last – they rise higher, and then shrink, become ordinary as the night wears on. By the way, shouldn’t I let you sleep? Do you need sleep?”  
  
“Not in any hurry. Eventually. One shouldn’t abuse the Catalepsean lobe when it isn’t called for, but I can quite comfortably go without sleep for as long as two weeks, should the need arise.” Mersadie detected a note of almost childlike pride in the Astartes’ tone. “Why the moon?”  
  
“Some watch clouds and make up stories about the shapes and creatures they see there. The clouds shift too fast, fading, never repeating – so as a child, I decided I’d have the moon instead. Home was a tiny place on a high floor in a hive-city, so I saw plenty of the sky. Never dared believe I could end up passing beyond it though, until I made it into the remembrance project. As much as I wanted to be part of this, to be up here, I think I wanted to be out of there more than anything else.”  
  
“I think it’s like that for all who leave their home-worlds so far behind. I guess it must have been that way for me. Growing up on Cthonia is grim business…”  
  
“Where is it not?” Mersadie chuckled grimly.  
  
“The future we were paving the way for, I had hoped…”  
  
 Mersadie opened her eyes, and found herself glad to have held in the bitter laugh that bubbled up inside her at those words – Loken had a haunted look about him. She had hoped to get off-world and write about a Great Crusade and its noble soldiery – that she had been disillusioned with the project over the course of a year was not even a loss of faith. It was certainly in no way commensurate to the crumbling of all foundations Loken was struggling to weather – it was not even comprehensible to him that Astartes could turn on their own, that his adored Primarch, the father and very soul of his Legion, could be anything other than perfect and right, that the chain of command could fail and the Crusade he lived and breathed for could falter in its track, its principles and direction called into question.  
  
Searching for words and coming up short, she brushed her hand across his.  
  
“I’m sorry…”  
  
His skin was warm to the touch, almost feverish.  
  
Loken noted how cool and small the hand that had briefly flitted through his grasp felt. How somehow significant, distantly meaningful.  
  
_What do you remember of Cthonia?_  
  
“I don’t remember much. No way to interface with places that might have been ‘home’ now, nothing that I could go back to, how I am. And I don’t want to go back. Or remember. Anything.”  
  
His eyes seemed huge in his face, his pupils blasted wide, half with dusk, half with whatever endorphins a body doped its scrambling, lost mind with at times when words crawled too far under the skin, and hands met, however briefly, in the secret handshake of people eager to disappear with one-another’s help. Heavy brow, nose broken several times over and healed a little crooked. Mersadie rocked up onto her knees, facing him – the way he slouched, she was briefly the taller of the two. Hesitated for the fraction of a second, tension and sparking static running between her solar plexus and the pit of her stomach, the sudden shrinking of the distance between them vertiginous. Leant down with a sense of leaping into black water off a tall cliff, to remember nothing.  
  
He tilted his head, his mouth coming up to meet hers, clumsy and expectant and inhumanly warm, bumping teeth for the fraction of a second. The jolt of first contact like biting down on tin foil, or licking a battery. Mersadie pressed herself against him, the perpetual fever-heat of the absurdly fast Astartes metabolism welcome, seeping into her skin. She felt his arms come up around her, slow, as though uncertain, one hand coming to rest – carefully, ever so carefully – on the nape of her neck, his thumb one side of it, his fingers – the other. She felt small enough to vanish in him, her own hands asking wordless questions of where skin met armour-ports along his back, of where a ridge-scar stretched, of where his jaw hinged and the skin was surprisingly soft, vulnerable with a frantic, hammering pulse, of anywhere she could get her hands to. And her mouth, she thought. And then she’d ask him what it all feels like, later, she decided.  
  
Loken lifted the remembrancer into his lap, her robes bunching up around her waist, the carbon-dark skin of her thighs exposed, soft. His hands moved of their own accord as she moved against him, finding everywhere forms that felt long-ago-familiar, but cold to touch now, small in his hands, almost frightening to touch for fear of breaking. Still welcome. _What do you remember of Cthonia?_   Something like this, nothing like this, he’d have to learn all over again. He’d be happy to learn. Feeling himself getting hard, his twin hearts thudding, her tiny mouth sucking spots down his neck, breath on his skin, in his ear, wet, ticklish. _I don’t want to remember anything._ His cock pressing against the inside of her thigh, and then vertigo.

His head swam, center of gravity shifting like the _Spirit_ was tilting beneath him, blood thundering in his ears as he clung onto her, some tiny machine part of himself keeping him from crushing her in his arms. His hands moved under her robes, feeling the hard point of a breast scratching the ball of his thumb and rasping on the pads of his fingers. She shivered against him, and he moved down, fingers tracing the hollows between her ribs, feeling her chest expand and contract with her breathing, then gripping the soft flesh of her flanks. Loken imagined coal-black flesh under his pale fingers, and thought of the black wolf’s head with the white crescent in its mouth. 

She was kissing all over his face, like she was trying to kiss each one of the freckles scattered across his cheekbones. He felt her hand on the back of his head, gripping some of his hair and using it to pull herself up so she could tilt his head back and press their mouths together again. Loken was stuck, frozen, whilst Mersadie was becoming more fierce: her kisses came harder and more forceful, sucking red marks onto his pale skin and Loken found himself uncommonly shocked when her tongue slipped past his lips to seek his own.

His hands went down further still, moving back to brush the soft, downy hairs on the small of her back before slipping down, under her thighs to the smooth swell of her buttocks.

Mersadie shuddered at his touch, and her hands slipped down to his collarbones, her fingertips digging into the muscle there. Loken kissed her mouth again, trying to repeat what she had done, then on a burst of inspiration, moved down and started sucking kisses onto the line of her jaw, tracing the delicate bone as he made his way towards her throat. She gasped as he pressed his lips against the hammering pulse-point there, rough tongue rasping over the soft skin as he sucked a mark of his own onto her. Small hands clenched on his collarbones, and he felt her pushing against him.

“L-lie back,” she husked as he traced the line of her jaw with the tip of his nose. Obediently, he reclined back onto his cot, watching as her hands went to the fastening of his fatigue pants. Loken could see his cock bulging out the material where it was forced into the leg, and felt an unknowable stab of something in the pit of his stomach. Was he nervous? The thought drew a certain dry amusement from the supine captain; it was a little too late to be having second thoughts.

Then Mersadie popped open the clasp and Loken forgot his jitters as he lifted his weight off the bed to let her pull his pants down enough to expose him. His cock swung free, standing upright like a spear. He saw her eyes widen, the silver iris of her ocular implant snapping shut for a moment and Loken almost spluttered a scandalized laugh when he realized she had blink-clicked him.

_That would give the Remembrancers something to talk about._

“Oh,” she said, still staring. “Oh.”

“What?” Loken asked, feeling the frantic passion beginning to ebb, and the enclosing threat of reason returning.

“Nothing,” she said and swung a smooth leg across his pelvis so she could climb on top of him. Loken was wide enough, even across the hips, that she could kneel straight on him without risk of slipping off. He reached out, fingers gripping her calves as he steadied her. She raised herself up, hiking up the hem of her robe with one hand as she moved into position over him. Her other hand went down and gripped his cock just below the head, fingers not quite able to encircle the shaft. Loken’s hearts gave a _thump_ in his chest, like he’d been hit in the gut by a greenskin and had the wind knocked out of him. Her tiny hand felt so _warm_ on his flesh. He swallowed, hearts resuming their frenzied drumbeat, struggling to breathe though what felt like iron chains seemed to be wrapped around his ribs, strangling the breath out of him.

Some of his shock must have been visible to the mortal, as she smiled encouragingly at him. “Don’t worry, I know it’s your first time,” she grinned, moving forward so that she was directly over his shaft. Her hand was tight on him as she guided it under the hem of her lifted robe. He glimpsed wetness glistening in the shadows beneath the fabric, then shuddered as he felt something hot and wet drag across the head of his cock.His hands spasmed on her thighs as she rubbed herself with him, moisture smearing the fat head. _Mersadie,_ he meant to say, but the first syllable caught in his chest so that he moaned “ _‘sadie_ ,” instead.

She gave that nervous smile again, as though she were struggling not to lose her nerve. “It-it’s been a while for me, Garvi. I just don’t want to-” Her weight went onto his cock for a moment and her words were lost in a gasp, “-aahh!" The hem of her robes fell as she let it go to hold herself up. His tip was inside her, Garviel marveled, wet heat pressing in on him like she was trying to force him back out.

The errant word “speartip” floated into his mind at that moment, and Loken was barely able to stifle a giggle at thought of Abaddon or even the Warmaster’s faces if they were to find out what he was doing. Mersadie didn’t notice her lover’s amusement, such was her focus on holding herself rigid. Garviel was _big_ , a great deal bigger than she’d expected (in retrospect, it seemed obvious, the remembrancer part of her brain mused), and she was struggling to repress the urge to just impale herself on him and damn the pain. Her loins throbbed, every part of her being seeming to concentrate on where she could feel the head, just the _tip_ of the head, inside her.

More hot liquid spilled down his shaft as Mersadie shifted her weight again, clenching her abdominal muscles in an attempt to draw more out from within herself. Slowly, and surely, she leaned her weight back onto him.

Loken felt something _squish_ against the driving head of his cock, and then, as she continued to release her weight, she slowly started to open up to him. His hands fluttered on her hips, eyes rolling as he tried to process the feeling of slowly being enveloped and drawn into her throbbing, aching body. Flesh squelched as she slid down him, Mersadie’s teeth gritting against the divine _stretch_ of being opened up by Loken. She hadn’t been lying, it _had_ been a long time since she had taken someone like this, and _never_ had she been taken so _much_ herself.

Heat throbbed up from where he was coring her out, pulsing against the rigid spear within her to pool in her belly. Her hand left his shaft, he was in too deep and too thick anyway for her to need worry he would slip out, and slipped back inside her robe to pinch and pluck at the points of her breasts. Electric sensation jolted down her nerves, making her stomach do a flip as she tentatively rocked her hips against him, pulling herself down another inch.

Loken groaned aloud at this, the slick walls of her insides clenching around him. He could feel a pressure building at the base of his cock, like the charge in the capacitor bank of a volcano cannon.

_Speartip, now Volcano Cannon,_ said a snide voice in the back of his mind that sounded an awful lot like Tarik, _are you getting an **ego** , Garvi?_

He pushed the thoughts away with a faintly lupine growl that rumbled in his chest, thrusting his hips and drawing a sharp gasp from Mersadie as she bounced on him. Her hand splayed on the ridged muscles of his belly, fingernails digging into the tough skin. “G-aah! _Warn_ me before you do that,” she hissed, trying not to acknowledge the way her thighs clenched, reflexively trying to pull him in deeper.

Her body knew how long it had been, even if she tried to pretend she fucked space marines all the time. His final penetration had started a landslide inside her, one that pushed away her caution and had her bouncing on his shaft, thrusting it deeper and deeper into her, squeezing it that miniscule distance further in…

Liquid splashed against Loken’s pelvis, and Mersadie went rigid on top of him, her muscles contracting on his shaft so hard he thought he’d lose it. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a suppressed moan as her thighs trembled against his hips, rocking herself back and forth on him. Then she went slack, slumping down and propping herself up with both arms. Her body glistened with sweat.

“Mersadie?” He said softly, concern entering his voice. “Are you alright?”

“Mhmm,” she groaned, “Did you finish? I can’t tell…” She shifted slightly, letting out a faint gasp, and pulled her robe up and over her head, tossing it onto the foot of the bed behind her. Loken’s gaze went to her sweaty breasts, the small mounds heaving on her chest as she sucked in air. He slid a hand up her torso, following the path he had taken across her ribcage earlier, and cupped one of her breasts in his hand, flicking and pushing the point with his thumb. An almost pained look creased the remembrancer’s brows and he went to withdraw his hand only for her to capture it with her own.

She pulled his hand up, his index and middle fingers enough to fill her palm completely, drawing it to her face. Slowly, she licked the tips of his fingers and guided them back down to where their bodies joined. There, just above the curls of Loken’s pale pubic hairs, she pressed them against a tiny knot of flesh that glistened against his shaft, rubbing it harder and harder until she gasped and shuddered again, fingernails biting into his hand as she reflexively squeezed it tight.

When her convulsions were finally finished, she released his hand and gently eased herself off of him. There was a soft sucking sound as she unsheathed herself from him, juices dripping from her gaping lower lips to splatter the sheet. His cock was still standing proud, red and glistening, when she squirmed off of him and knelt between his legs.

“Sorry, Garvi,” she said, her voice heavy with either pain or weariness, Loken couldn’t tell. “But, I had to stop if I, you know, wanted to be able to _walk_ tomorrow.”

“That’s fine,” he started to say, at the same time as she said, “But still, fair’s fair,” and leaned forward over his shaft. For a split-second Loken had no idea what she was doing, then she opened her mouth to almost _inhale_ the head of his cock and he had to snatch the thin pillow from behind his head and clamp it over his face to smother a shout. The pillow obscured his vision of what she was doing, and in some ways that hastened his end, as though his not being able to see her head bobbing up and down between his legs forced him to instead focus on the feeling of her sucking and gagging on his cock whilst her tongue swirled around the head, and thereby heightened the sensation.

The pressure built under his shaft almost to the point of agony, and Loken felt his balls tighten.  Muscles clenched, Loken felt a dizzying _rush_ that seemed to sweep up from his toes, and then Mersadie was choking and swallowing, gulping and coughing before pulling back and triumphantly wiping a trace of his cum from her chin with the back of her hand.

An indeterminate amount of time later, they lay together on the bed. Or, rather, Loken lay on the bed, Mersadie lay on his chest. His arm was loose around her waist, her head was pillowed on the rigid shell of his chest. Neither spoke, lost in their own thoughts.

It took a moment for Loken to realize that Mersadie was crying.

“Miss…” _A little late for formalities, eh Garvi?_ “Mersadie? What’s wrong?”

Loken wondered if he had hurt her unwittingly, or if the magnitude of what they had done had reached her at last. True, he had never heard of any explicit laws against such a union, but he doubted that such a thing would go over well in a legion as prestigious as his.

“I just-” she choked, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, “I’m _scared_ , Garviel. Scared of what’s going to happen. Ev-” she hiccuped, breaking the word in half, “-ever since Davin, I feel like everything’s been going wrong.”

“So do I,” he admitted, as much to himself as to her. _Could I have stopped all this from happening?_ he wondered. _If I had been a little faster reaching the temple where they took the warmaster, or before that, if I had stopped him from going into that wretched starship in the first place._

He pushed the thoughts away. Dwelling on them would do neither of them any good.

“We must be strong.” He said, finally. “For our friends, and for those who depend on us.” He took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “You have Euphrati and Kyril, I have Tarik. We can look after each other.”

“I’m sorry, Garvi, but… Well, you didn’t do such a good job of looking after Karkasy, did you?”

“I wasn’t there, then,” Loken replied, stung. “My brothers needed me. All of them. Now that they have turned their backs on me for good…” The words hung in the air as he contemplated what he’d never realized that he had until he’d lost it for good. “Well, I shan’t be too late again.” Impulsively, he kissed the crown of Mersadie’s bulging cranium. “I promise.”


End file.
